Doing More with Genre: Lessons and Reentry from Movies and Books
I am not a pirate, exploiting at night the harbors of coastal bliss.
Nor am I a high priest, beholden to the drastic dogma of my faith. Night and light, faith and piracy — these are extremes. I like to play both against the middle. Perhaps this is why I’ve always loved selecting a range of genres to play in. In between, most mornings, I find myself merely a seriously addicted book writer now trying my swing into different genres.
This entry is about why try? Why extend your writer’s wings into the different flights of genre? First answer….well…..
REENTRY IS FUN
After a dozen serious inland books on business and society, Covid-19 gave me the time to explore new forms in the turbulent seas of rampant creativity.
You can see this in my new book 2040: A Fable. Here Sam Smolik, an author from Texas and a former executive at Shell and Dow, kindly coined my first try at a Fable a “masterpiece” on Amazon! No one, including myself, ever thought I’d enjoy writing a Fable so much. Let alone a Fable that is more about public affairs and self-discovery than about science fiction. I love the film Avatar very much, but I love the chance to reflect on friendship, family and surveillance capitalism even more through my own writing and character development.
Before 2040, I left formal expository nonfiction evidence based social history books — titles like Doing More with Less or Doing More with Teams, or World Inc, and wrote six short biographies.
Why?
Again for fun, genre experimentation you might say. When George Orwell writes his famous “Why I Write?” he undersells the fun of genre shifting, yet he was a master at it.
I did not write these biographies with the heavy earnestness you find in the great historians like William Manchester on Churchill, or Taylor Branch on Martin Luther King, or Robert Caro on L. B. Johnson. Instead, I wrote about people that are not yet famous, like Winston Churchill did on Great Contemporaries. You can see it in the colorful short biographies out these last two years. The genre of biography is morphing, as we speak, it is not only about deceased legends, and monumental events.
And now — oh should I confess the rest — I want to write a serious series of children’s books about a renaissance boy. That is four genres in one decade: non-fiction, biography, fable, and a memoir too, Missing Persons.
WHY A RENAISSANCE BOY AT 12 YEARS OLD?
Well, because at 66, I now realize my strange feelings in junior and high school classes were not always caused by girls! This Renaissance Boy, let’s call him Stan, found himself smarter than many of his teachers until he won his scholarship to college. There at college he meets his match, and some real teachers, not slackers and bigots. I wanted to wonder, through the genre of children’s books, how many other children might feel the same.
What an odd feeling, as you look around your school? It is not that you are superior; you keep it secret. But time proves you right.
One teacher of social studies in my high school, a coach and a prior great basketball player, was quite dumb, certainly dim-witted. He simply repeated in the exact order of the class text, and repeated in perfect script, slowly, the bold sub-sections on the board, verbatim — consuming the period of the class this way. And that was teaching him! He thought I was a genius because I could answer some questions before he got to ask them in his roundly predictable sequence of text sections! He was fast on the court, but not in his mind. At 14, I already saw past his every word, his every damn question in class.
Stan will be like this, but even worse.
Another, meaner but equally limited teacher, laughed when I said I wanted to become a writer when I grew up. This rather numb teacher called me an immigrant, when I asked her “why not!” She insisted, with no self-awareness, that I might prove her wrong. This is nothing short of how prejudice and bigotry carries forward through the decades. She was a destructive teacher of ambition and dreaming, and I was smart enough to feel sorry for her.
So my Stan — the twelve year old boy in my book — will astonish with outlandish facts in his head. My wife and I notice these kids together. The young Indian child, who is nine, at our weekend market selling food with his parents, knows everything about space travel, NASA and Lockheed Martin jets and satellites, by name, year, and technology. Who made this kid at nine? I enjoy catching up with him from time to time. Amazing child.
So by 12, Stan will already have a new challenge: how to tolerate all the dumb teachers trying to type him as “mad scientist” or “precious brat.”
GENRE OFFERS NEW FRONTIERS
I guess writers have restless minds. We like to invent characters in a fable, or bizarre storylines in children’s books, no matter their expertise. Let’s do a table, for fun. This enables us to pretend there is a pattern to all this.
The box office hits of the 1930s in film spread across the classical genres:
- Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a 1937 fantasy classic.
- Gone with the Wind, 1939, fits the seal of approval of popular Romance.
- The Wizard of Oz, 1939, was in a Fable, fantastic and unforgettable.
- King Kong, yes first out in 1933, was like a children’s book.
- Hell’s Angels, by Howard Hughes in 1930, was an adventure and action film.
- Lost Horizon by the original Frank Capra is 1937 was a mixed genre.
- Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, also by Capra, in 1939, is more Public Affairs.
Credit: Source: BFI National Archive © Dmitri Kasterine
In studying film, I am impressed most by Frank Capra and Stanley Kubrick. They are not pirates, roaming the seas. They earn their riches through serious depiction of select genres.
These seven classic 1930s films had equivalents in the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1970s — when I became a serious movie addict, and thru this decade, where you can find me at the movies three or four times a week, or at home another three or four times with my wife at home theatre. As we move as a world more dominated by videos, immersive experiences, clicks and social media impressions, I think it important to contemplate what is similar about the genres of film and writing.
DOING MORE WITH GENRE
Now all those 1930 films began to explore larger audiences because of the technological advances of glorious technicolor, or what is also called color film. While Walt Disney enjoyed the exclusive rights to do animated films at the time; most others could compete in cross genre work. But my point is this: few directors and producers strayed between genres, except maybe Frank Capra. It is easier to raise money by narrowing your scope. A pity shared in publishing.
Then there are artists like Stanley Kubrick who centered their exceptional careers on shifting genres. Think about it. 2001 is science fiction, and a form that sums up human history into a frightened voice activated Hal computer with malicious intent.
Barry Lyndon is a classic social history film, made big time, with glorious expansive scenes featuring the handsome new stars. He kept changing genres. Full Metal Jacket is half actual Vietnam documentary, half made-up horror. And then of course, you get Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Kubrick was a master at doing more with genre. Over the next year, as I explore the nature of prejudice in these Medium.com entries, I will come back again and again to how widespread Spike Lee is in exploring different genres. A true talent, and an amazing energy level to do this.
Who knows what I will write after the children’s books. I am not a pirate, so I will always learn a genre to fool around with, like I did with my creative memoir that the publisher noted as about the past, present and future me.
Please note, I do know how to describe the things of pirates: there 17th century Algerian corsairs sword; the powder flasks they kept dry as agents of the Knights of St. John, the Mariner’s compass helping them get to the ports of their own self-aggrandizement and terror. But I am not a pirate, exploiting at night the harbors of coastal bliss. Nor am I the true believer of exploiting the royalties of only one kind of genre writing. That is perhaps why I’ve had to leave three commercial agents so far, who get lazy wanting you to do the same kind of thing over and over again. Life is too short for that, my friends.
Instead, my know-how is in genre. Look up what M. H. Abrams talks about genre in his Glossary of Literary Terms. It gives you a lifetime of new trials.
